We Lost Our Hearts to the Little Pink Pirate

The little pink pirate came into my life from a newspaper clipping a few weeks before Christmas in 1967, shortly after the sparkling extravaganza of holiday decorations went up along the Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City.

The city was always at its best around Christmas, the air sharp with the chill of its high mountain plateau.

The Reforma, the city’s main street, looked more than ever like the Paris boulevards it was patterned after. The towering buildings that line its route for miles were covered with holiday symbols in bright lights--three, four, a dozen or more stories tall.

I was a correspondent for an American news service. Sitting in the sunset gloom of my office overlooking the Reforma, I was admiring the lights and flipping idly through the evening papers looking for a story worth lifting.

One of them had a beaut from Puebla, a city about 85 miles to the east. A little girl had been taken to a hospital there from an Indian village, somewhere off in the mountains, for treatment of an eye ailment.

Her name was Aurelia and she was about 5 years old, I think. Time has stolen many of the details.

After a week or so, her father had returned for her. But he had too little money to pay the bill, so the hospital refused to release her.

She was being held as human security for the debt incurred by her father, who lived in an ancient subsistence economy, based partly on bartering crops he could grow with his hands. Paper money was part of the alien world beyond the mountains, the city world that had somehow captured his daughter.

He told a hospital clerk that it was many days’ walk to his home, and he could not afford to stay in the city. He would have to look for money and return. And so he left.

The story checked out in a phone call to the hospital. It was a perfect “wire opener” for afternoon papers--just short enough to fill the little holes that editors find in the news columns, just offbeat enough to add some human interest to a front page weighed down with the Vietnam War.

I left it with a batch of other stories for the late-night Teletype operator and forgot all about it.

*

Writing news stories like that for hundreds of newspapers all over the globe is somewhat like raising countless children and sending them out into the world, where they are subject to the unfathomable winds of fate, meaning the whims of many editors.

Some vanish without a trace. Others get into trouble and make you sorry you ever heard of them. Every now and then, one gets straight A’s at Harvard and becomes rich and famous.

The little hostage story was one of those. It must have appeared in scores of newspapers, because two days later I started getting telephone calls from editors scattered around the United States.

What should they do with the money?

What money?

Why, the money their readers were sending to get that poor little girl out of the hospital and back with her family for Christmas.

“And don’t tell me to send it to the hospital,” said one from Texas. “I don’t much trust anyone who’d hold a little girl prisoner like that.”

All of them, of course, wanted a follow-up story about the little girl’s release and reunion with her family, so their generous readers could see what a good deed they’d done for Christmas.

I wasn’t in the little-girl-rescuing business. I was in the reporting business and I had other things to do.

But I figured that if I took the money down to Puebla and got her out, at the very least none of the other correspondents would be able to get in on the story, which had attracted a growing amount of interest. The news service’s New York headquarters had asked me what to do with the first contributions starting to arrive from readers in England and the Philippines.

I opened a bank account as a trust fund for Aurelia, with myself and another reporter as trustees. But I was still wondering what to do with this little girl.

The donors, and my editors, had no notion that this was more complicated than just paying a hospital bill in Houston or London and sending Aurelia home in a taxi.

There was no record of the name of her village, much less any useful clue to where it was, other than the presumption that it was somewhere in an almost roadless mountain range where the people spoke Aurelia’s language. She apparently didn’t know the name, and couldn’t speak Spanish in any case.

I dismissed the idea of plunging into the mountains with a guide and a string of mules; aside from being quixotically impractical, the news service would never have allowed me to spend so much time on one story.

When I telephoned the hospital, I spoke to an administrator miffed over fallout from the unfavorable publicity. The little girl needed further treatment, but he would be delighted to get her off his hands, and forget the bill, if only there were a proper person to take responsibility for her.

He made it clear that he did not think American correspondents were proper persons.

*

A Mexican friend knew a doctor who owned a small, private hospital on the south side of the city. The doctor agreed to take Aurelia as a patient until I could locate her family.

The first outlay from the Aurelia Fund paid for a private ambulance from Puebla to Mexico City.

The doctor sent a nurse to ride with her. I followed in my own car. Aurelia came through the hospital door with two-thirds of her head and face covered in bandages. She was extremely shy and obviously frightened by the presence of yet more strange adults.

She could not understand our words, but we were obviously not Daddy, come to take her home. Her face trembled with restrained tears, but she did not cry.

We left phone numbers with the hospital administrators, telling them that when Aurelia’s father returned, they should contact me or the doctor. Mostly they seemed interested in getting rid of us.

With Aurelia stashed in the hospital, I was mentally outlining the dandy story I would write in a few days about her rescue and reunion with her father.

I never wrote that one.

Arriving at work the next day, I found a message to call the doctor right away.

“This little girl is in far more serious condition than they bothered to find out in Puebla,” he said. “She has a brain tumor, which I think is malignant. Cancer. I am having some tests done, but if they turn out the way I suspect, I am probably going to have to remove her right eye this afternoon.”

I doubted that even the rapidly growing Aurelia Fund could handle that expense and told him so.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I will do whatever needs to be done. You can pay whatever you can.

“I guess if her father doesn’t find us, you and I have acquired a little daughter. Let me worry about the medicine; you worry about Christmas, though, because she will probably never have another one.’

*

While Aurelia’s eye was being removed that afternoon, I went Christmas shopping. I had two little girls of my own, Veronica and Victoria, about her age. I shopped for all three at once.

I bought a Santa sack of gifts, including a bright pink and white dress with a little white crinoline and knee socks and black patent leather Mary Janes.

Then I did an unforgivable thing for a journalist, for someone whose profession is to be detached and objective. I set out to make readers reach for their checkbooks.

The Aurelia Fund clearly needed a lot more money. If I had stirred up a thousand dollars or two with a coldly impersonal brief, how much could I haul in if I really reached out and squeezed their hearts?

Professionally, this was a sin. I decided that I could be sinful this once--and if anyone objected, to hell with them.

I wrote it as a report to the stockholders of the Aurelia Fund, a personal report from me. I worked in every sentimental writing touch I could, with lots of details about the songs and food and customs of Christmas in the kind of village Aurelia came from.

It read like it would do the trick. Then again, if your subject is a little girl dying on Christmas Eve in a vast city, bewildered and lost and far from her family, you needn’t be all that great a writer to make it touching.

Returning from dinner, I found my boss bent over a Teletype machine, reading the story. He was an international sophisticate who spoke five languages, had a loan shark’s eye for a balance sheet and could be hard as diamond. Tears were running down his face.

“Helluva job,” he sniffled. “Here.” He dumped the bills in his wallet on my desk.

Jackpot. It was going to work.

*

Igave Aurelia her Christmas presents just before a holiday party the clinic’s nurses organized for a handful of child patients. She loved the pink dress and actually shouted in what sounded like delight when she unwrapped it. Nobody knew what she had said, but we all laughed together.

She put it on for the party.

She was wearing a black patch over her empty eye socket. I told her she looked like a pirate. “La Pirata Rosa,” we joked. The Pink Pirate. The other kids took it up as a good-natured nickname. She learned it in Spanish and responded to it as readily as “Aurelia” for the rest of her life.

At our own family Christmas that year, I watched my daughters play with the toys I bought while shopping for Aurelia and almost cried with relief that no tragedy like hers had ever touched them.

The Christmas Eve report swelled the Aurelia Fund into the thousands. The doctor was obviously absorbing most of her hospital bills, but I paid what I could and kept some for when her father returned, figuring he’d need cash in the big city.

He never did.

At least that’s what the hospital in Puebla said whenever I checked. I never really trusted their dismissive answers. I looked in on Aurelia every month or two. Her condition was still terminal but the doctor was keeping it at bay.

She learned to speak Spanish but knew no clue to the name of her village except that it was “muy, muy lejos” --very, very far.

*

Another Christmas rolled around. By then I was comfortable with professional sin. I banged out another tear-jerker and more money rolled in.

My family and I would be going to the United States for Christmas so I left the gifts I bought for Aurelia with the doctor. Aurelia spent Christmas with the family of a nurse who had young children. Her presents--bought with money mailed in by good-hearted people from Houston and Manila and New York, kindly people from Manchester and Des Moines and Caracas--appeared magically along with theirs. A child of the world, if she but knew it.

When I returned from a vacation in July there was a note on my desk to call the doctor. “Not urgent,” it said. I knew before I dialed the number what that meant.

“She is gone,” he said. “She died two weeks ago.”

I told him I was sorry to hear that.

“Well,” he said, “we gave her a year. We gave her a whole year that she would not have had otherwise.”

I mailed him a last check, closed Aurelia’s bank account and wrote a final Aurelia Fund Report for the news service, stealing the doctor’s words for the conclusion: “You gave her a year, you gave her one more Christmas.”

I left Mexico two years later.

This Christmas, my wife and I are going back. Our daughters, adults now with careers in the East, will meet us there. We will spend Christmas in a little town in the mountains west of Mexico City.

I expect that sometime on Christmas Eve, with my daughters safely grown and snug in their beds, I’ll find myself outside, looking up at the mountains not that far from those Aurelia came from.

I’ll always wonder if out there, someplace beyond the roads, there’s another father, who looks at his family on Christmas and sees an empty place at the table, who looks up at those same mountains and wonders “Aurelia, where did you go? What did they do with you?”